The Shipwrecked Mind Quotes

“When you abandon the Lord, it's only a matter of time before you start worshipping the Führer.”
― Mark Lilla, The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction

“Narratives of progress, regress, and cycles all assume a mechanism by which historical change happens. It might be the natural laws of the cosmos, the will of God, the dialectical development of the human mind or of economic forces. Once we understand the mechanism, we are assured of understanding what really happened and what is to come. But what if there is no such mechanism? What if history is subject to sudden eruptions that cannot be explained by any science of temporal tectonics? These are the questions that arise in the face of cataclysms for which no rationalization seems adequate and no consolation seems possible. In response an apocalyptic view of history develops that sees a rip in time that widens with each passing year, distancing us from an age that was golden or heroic or simply normal. In this vision there really is only one event in history, the kairos separating the world we were meant for from the world we must live in. That is all we can know, and must know, about the past.”
― Mark Lilla, The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction

“Houellebecq has created a new genre—the dystopian conversion tale. Submission is not the story some expected of an armed coup d’état, and no one in it expresses hatred or even contempt of Muslims. At one level it is simply about a man who through suffering and indifference finds himself slouching toward Mecca. At another level, though, it is about a civilization that after centuries of a steady, almost imperceptible sapping of inner conviction finds itself doing the same thing. The literature of civilizational decline, to which Zemmour’s Le Suicide français is a minor contribution, is typically brash and breathless. Not so Submission. There is not even drama here—no clash of spiritual armies, no martyrdom, no final conflagration. Stuff just happens, as in all Houellebecq’s fiction. All one hears at the end is a bone-chilling sigh of collective relief. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. Whatever.”
― Mark Lilla, The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction

“Islam here is an alien and inherently expansive social force, an empire in nuce. It can be peaceful, but it has no interest in compromise or in extending the realm of human liberty. It wants to shape better not freer ones.

Whatever Houellebecq thinks of it, Islam is not the target of Submission. It serves as a device to express a recurring European worry that the single-minded pursuit of freedom - freedom from tradition and authority, freedom to pursue one's own ends- must inevitably lead to disaster.”
― Mark Lilla, The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction

“Freedom is just another word for wretchedness.”
― Mark Lilla, The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction

“The literature of civilizational decline, to which Zemour's Le Suicide Francais is a minor contribution, is typically brash and breathless. Not so Submission. There is not even drama here, no clash of spiritual armies, no martyrdom, no final conflagration. All one hears at the end is a bone-chilling relief. The old has passed away. The new has come. Whatever.”
― Mark Lilla, The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction

“Universal histories teach us more about the historical crises that inspire them than they do about the civilizations they describe.”
― Mark Lilla, The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction

“Mary McCarthy, though, had it wrong when she wrote that “Madame Bovary is Don Quixote in skirts.” Emma’s suffering is Platonic: she searches, in all the wrong places and with all the wrong people, for an ideal that is only imagined. Until the end she believes that she will get the love and recognition she deserves. Quixote’s suffering is Christian. He has convinced himself that once upon a time the world really was what it was meant to be, that the ideal had been made flesh, then vanished. Having had a foretaste of paradise, his suffering is more acute than that of Emma, who longs for the improbable but not the impossible. Quixote awaits the Second Coming. His quest is doomed from the start because he is rebelling against the nature of time, which is irreversible and unconquerable”
― Mark Lilla, The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction

“Modern man became a Prometheus, believing himself a god capable of transforming anything and everything at will. “When God has become invisible behind the world,” Voegelin said, “the things of the world become new gods.” Once this is understood,”
― Mark Lilla, The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction

“Christianity turned its back on these ancient stories of fated decline. But it has never been able to escape historical mythmaking, despite the best efforts of theologians from Augustine to Karl Barth. The reason, as Hegel formulated it so well, is that Christian revelation is based on a unique divine incursion into the flow of historical time that altered but did not delegitimize an earlier divine–human relationship.”
― Mark Lilla, The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction